It's Easy for George McGovern to Praise Wal-Mart and Bash Unions

by Christopher ChantrillMay 22, 2006 at 11:17 am

GOOD OLD LIBERAL George McGovern can easily afford to praise Wal-Mart. He can praise if for its low prices. He san say that if you take the $27 million that Wal-Marts CEO took home and gave it to the hourly workers, that would only add up to $20.

The trouble is that More became Too Much. Look at parts marker Delphi. Delphi is in trouble, he writes.

One big reason is that the company's unionized workers earn $64 an hour in wages and benefits — more than twice what some of its competitors pay.

Of course, its easy for him to talk. Hes a Democrat-emeritus. Hes not running for anything. But still. Somebody has to say this sort of thing, and it might as well be George McGovern, the founder of the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party. But heres the money graf.

Universal healthcare provided by the federal government is one way to supplement income. It is also a way of relieving hard-pressed businesses of one of their highest cost burdens.

You can see where this is going. Bail out the auto companies with national health insurance. But let us get back to the high ground.

Liberals, he writes, must never abandon their core principles of justice and equality.

We can all agree on that. And how about starting with the unjust and inegalitarian fact that liberal Democrat union members working for state and local governments earn about 40-50 percent more than comparable workers in the private sector?

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists, she offered, smiling but meaning it.Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy. Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values

[The Axial Age] highlights the conception of a responsible self... [that] promise[s] man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it.Robert N Bellah, "Religious Evolution", American Sociological Review, Vol. 29, No. 3.

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Paul Dirac: When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.John Farrell, The Creation Myth

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...David Martin, On Secularization